Magister Educationis - MEd / Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), through the use of iPads in English Home Language in the Intermediate Phase, with a special focus on Grade six, at one primary school in the Western Cape. Through the lens of the Sociocultural and Constructivist theories, the study investigated how iPads were used for language and literacy development in the Grade six classroom where English was the main medium of instruction. The study was purely a qualitative single case study involving one teacher and one class of 28 learners at a well-resourced former-white school in Cape Town. Data was collected through classroom observations and interviews. The interviews were conducted with six selected learners, one Grade six teacher, the Head of Department (HOD) and the Principal. The analysis of the transcribed interviews, video recordings and documents was done through the Atlast.Ti 7 software package. The findings of the study show that Grade six learners had good access to ICTs, and had no difficulties in using iPads for language and literacy learning. Their competence was associated with their high socio-economic backgrounds as most of them were from middle class families. The findings also indicated that teacher disposition had a positive impact on ICT implementation in the English lessons. Another interesting finding was that while the school had successfully adopted ICT as a teaching and learning resource, the Grade six teacher’s pedagogical strategies did not enhance learners’ comprehension of certain language (English) aspects such as grammar because there was no special training for integrating ICTs in language teaching. Overall, the results showed that the iPad is an extremely potential tool for literacy development and it encourages not only learners’ active engagement and collaboration as directed by the teacher, but also learner initiated engagement and collaboration. The study concludes that while many well-resourced schools seem to do well with regard to access to ICT and its integration in teaching and learning, technology cannot completely replace the role of the teacher in the classroom. There is a need for teacher development to enhance their own understanding of ICTs and how to use it for effective language and literacy teaching and learning.

This study of social interaction in a small religious group used ethnography of communication as a research method to collect and analyze data from 20 months of fieldwork. As a long-term participant-observer in a women-only interdenominational Bible study, I investigated the group’s patterned ways of speaking, how print and electronic learning materials influenced the practical application of Scripture to daily life, and how the contemporary format for women’s Bible study alters the traditional Bible study experience. Patterned ways of speaking in this setting included group discussions and conversational narratives about religion, motherhood and lack of time. Using affirmations of faith, mentoring advice and troubles talk that included indirect complaints, the women co-constructed new meanings in relational talk. The mediated Bible study experience shifts to women interpretive authority that has been dominated by clergy and men. Text and talk in the workbooks and videos stimulated interpretive conflict and reframing that gave the women intellectual autonomy and recognition for co-constructing knowledge as social worth. Storytelling in the workbooks, videos and local group membered the participants through shared identity, and multimodal learning materials stimulated critical thinking and mediated emotional intimacy in a national and global community. This interpretive community was therefore engaged in what I call women-centered practical theology, and their individual and collective reinterpretation of Scripture is characteristic of the postmodern reformation of Christianity.

Colombia has some 2.5 million emigrants (KNOMAD 2016), many of whom likely experience diaspora as a state of mind and transnationalism as a feature of their familial interactions. Storytelling constitutes an intersection at which individuals and families create and recreate themselves. Today, much of this process is mediated via information and communication technologies (ICTs). Hence, the central question guiding the thesis is: How do ICTs catalyze and constrain storytelling within transnational families? Drawing from information gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews with six Colombian families with members who immigrated to Canada from Colombia, this thesis investigates the technologically mediated familial interactions and storytelling of 12 adult Colombians residing in Montreal, and six of their respective family members who remain in Colombia. The participants report that prior to migrating their familial stories were mainly oral and occurred in very warm face-to-face situations whereas after migrating their family narratives and stories are being altered in various ways through the presence, interactive, and multimodal affordances ICTs provide.

In this dissertation, I address the relationship between the content and design of governmental websites and the ideological interests of the overseeing political administrations. Three case studies contrast the contemporary political climates in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Republic of Colombia, and the United Stastes with the form and function of their respective military recruitment homepages. Through a semiotic, and specifically multimodal lens, I aim to determine to what degree there is evidence of the governing poltical party’s ideological perspective on the websites. To accomplish this task, each case study is introduced by a brief contemporary history in order to provide a summary of key political events within state. Each case study then includes a detailed analysis of 3-4 governmental homepages. Within those analyses, a comprehensive multimodal analysis is conducted for the most evocative content on each homepage. Finally, conclusions are reached for each case study, paying special attention to the content found along the reading path.

Att låta elever uttrycka sig på flera olika sätt i skolan blir allt viktigare eftersom eleverna redan innan skolstart vistas i miljöer med oändliga kommunikationsmöjligheter. Eleverna behöver därför kunskap om hur och varför de olika uttrycks- och kommunikationssätten används, detta för att kunna bli fungerande medborgare i dagens samhälle (Schmidt, 2015).   Denna kvalitativa studie har genomförts med hjälp av frisvarsenkäter och handlat om multimodala arbetssätt i undervisningen. Tio lärare som undervisar i förskoleklass och årskurs 1–6 i sydvästra Sverige har deltagit i undersökningen.   Syftet med undersökningen är att ta reda på om läroplanens riktlinjer om multimodalt lärande genomförs i skolan och i så fall i vilken omfattning. För att besvara studiens syfte ställs följande forskningsfrågor:   Vilka för- och nackdelar upplever lärarna med multimodala arbetssätt i undervisningen?   Vad anser lärare påverkar deras val av arbetssätt i undervisningen?   Undersökningen gjordes med John Deweys infallsvinkel i pragmatism som utgångspunkt, vars grundtanke är att individ och samhälle påverkar varandra och därmed inte kan skiljas åt och att kunskap befästs vid praktiskt utförande. Teorin belyser därför att lärare behöver vara uppdaterade och förnya sig i sitt arbete. Även en av Europeiska unionens åtta nyckelkompetenser för ett livslångt lärande har fungerat som teori: digital kompetens.   Resultatet visar att arbete med multimodala arbetssätt i allra största utsträckning genomförs i skolan men med vissa hinder så som resurser, tid, personal och kompetens. Slutsatsen dras att lärare har olika uppfattningar om vad multimodalitet i skolan är. De anser att arbetet kräver guidning och stöttning av lärare med en tydlig planering och ett klart syfte. / Letting pupils express themselves in a variety of ways at school is becoming increasingly important, as pupils already reside in environments with infinite communication opportunities before they start school. The pupils therefore need knowledge about how and why the different expressions and communication methods are used, this to become functioning citizens in today's society (Schmidt, 2015).   This qualitative study has been carried out using open questionnaires and has been about multimodal working methods in teaching. Ten teachers who teach in pre-school classes and grades 1-6 in the southwest of Sweden have participated in the survey.   The purpose of the survey is to find out if the curriculum guidelines for multimodal learning are conducted at school and, if so, to what extent. To answer the study's purpose, the following research questions are asked:   What pros and cons do the teachers experience in multimodal working methods?   What do the teachers consider affects their choice of working methods in teaching?   The study was made with John Dewey's approach to pragmatism as a starting point, whose basic idea is that individuals and society influence each other and, therefore, cannot be separated. The approach also says that knowledge is consolidated in practical execution. The theory therefore explains that teachers need to be updated and renew their work. One of the European unions’ eight key competences for a lifelong learning has also worked as a theory.   The result shows that multimodal working methods it is carried out to the greatest extent in school but with certain obstacles such as resources, time, staff and skills. The conclusion is that teachers have different views on what multimodality in school is. They consider that work with multimodality requires guidance and support from teachers with a clear plan and a clear purpose.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The infographics is a multimodal gender that has been little studied in the school environment. Besides this, there are a few researches about the gender as a didactic means for Portuguese Language classes with the meaning to study it as a representation of social language practices. Like that, the research is focused on the process of literacy from the multimodal text or multisemiotics, specifically the infographics. For that, it will be developed reading activities, analysis, interpretation and production of the infographics with the students from 6th grade to 8th grade, who study in Junior High School, mainly including students of the 9th grade, noticing the conditions of production of such textual gender. With the aim to answer what was proposed in the objectives of this study, we start from the conception of language as a social activity (BAKHTIN,1992), and of the multimodal texts as the most distinct forms of the linguistic construction and of the presentation of the information/message (DIONÍSIO, 2005), we will search to examine the contribution of the infographics in the process of the literacy, understood in this research as the process of acquisition of the written culture, using the real reading of the writing as social practices (SOARES, 2004). From this purpose, it will be applied a didactic sequence, in the suggested pattern by Dolz, Noverraz and Schneuwly (apud Marcuschi, 2008), that proposes a work with a textual gender. In this research, we choose the infographics for being a multimodal with a great deal of information, uniting in a harmonious way the text to the image. / O infográfico é um gênero multimodal ainda pouco estudado no ambiente escolar. Além disso, há poucas pesquisas sobre o gênero como um recurso didático para as aulas de Língua Portuguesa no sentido de estudá-lo como uma representação das práticas sociais da linguagem. Dessa forma, esta pesquisa tem como foco o processo de letramento a partir do texto multimodal ou multissemiótico, especificamente o infográfico. Para isso, serão desenvolvidas atividades de leitura, análise, interpretação e produção do infográfico com alunos da segunda fase do Ensino Fundamental, especificamente os do 9º ano, observando as condições de produção de tal gênero textual. Visando atender ao proposto nos objetivos deste estudo, partimos da concepção de língua como uma atividade social (BAKHTIN, 1992), e dos textos multimodais como as “mais distintas formas de construção linguística e de apresentação da informação/mensagem (DIONÍSIO, 2005), procuraremos verificar a contribuição do infográfico no processo de letramento, entendido nesta pesquisa como o “processo de apropriação da cultura escrita fazendo uso real da leitura e da escrita como práticas sociais (SOARES, 2004). Partindo desse pressuposto, será aplicada uma sequência didática, nos moldes sugeridos por Dolz, Noverraz e Schneuwly (apud Marcuschi, 2008), que propõem um trabalho com o gênero textual. No caso, desta pesquisa, optamos pelo infográfico por ser um gênero multimodal com grande teor informativo, aliando de forma harmoniosa o texto à imagem.

The objective of this research is to analyze the structure of the digital tool `educational site, looking for interactivity, usability and hypertextuality, essential elements for its constitution and to present quality assessment requirements of that to give subsidies to the teacher who uses it. Its theme is the study of digital language and the delimitation of the theme is some of their basic properties and its application in that tool. The theoretical background for this work is the concept of interactivity, Silva (2000); usability, Nielsen (2007); hypertextuality, Coscarelli (2003), Koch (2011) Marcuschi (1999), Xavier (2003); multimodality, Mozdzenski (2008) and on computer literacy, Moran (2000), Oliveira and Azevedo (2010), Oliveira and Gurpilhares (2010). This work applied quantitative method for searching and selecting some pages found on Google and qualitative method for analyzing the pages based on some digital language elements. The result was that most educational sites does not include satisfactorily the elements interactivity, usability and hypertextuality, important elements. No one site that meets the criteria has been found. However, it is believed that some of them can be used after they had been analyzed rigorously to not harm the students. Keywords: / O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar a estrutura da ferramenta digital `site educacional, observando se há interatividade, usabilidade e hipertextualidade, elementos essenciais para a constituição daquela, apresentando critérios de avaliação da qualidade da mesma para dar subsídios ao professor que a utiliza. A pesquisa tem como tema o estudo da linguagem digital e como delimitação do tema algumas de suas propriedades básicas e sua aplicação naquela ferramenta. Os pressupostos teóricos para este trabalho são a conceituação de interatividade, Silva, (2000); usabilidade, Nielsen (2007); hipertextualidade, Coscarelli (2003), Koch (2011), Marcuschi (1999), Xavier (2003); multimodalidade, Mozdzenski (2008) e o letramento digital, Moran (2000), Oliveira e Azevedo (2010), Oliveira e Gurpilhares (2010). Este trabalho se realizou quantitativamente pela pesquisa da seleção das páginas buscadas no Google e qualitativamente pela análise das páginas quanto aos elementos da linguagem digital. O resultado obtido foi que a maioria dos sites educacionais não contempla de maneira satisfatória os elementos interatividade, usabilidade e hipertextualidade, tão importantes na composição de uma página na Internet. Não foi encontrado nenhum site que atenda aos critérios de maneira elementar. Contudo, acredita-se que é possível usar alguns deles após submetê-los a uma análise criteriosa para que o aluno não seja prejudicado.

This research investigated Punjabi children’s meaning-making processes as they engaged with culturally relevant literature, and presents a critical evaluation of Punjabi and Sikh representation in children’s literature. The Punjabi community in Canada is growing rapidly, with Punjabi being the third most commonly spoken non-official language in Canada. Yet, this minority group remains underrepresented in educational research. Past research has shown the numerous benefits minority children experience when engaging with literature that authentically represents their cultural background (see Cunard, 1996; Goldblatt, 1999; Goo, 2018; Steiner, Nash & Chase, 2008; Zhang & Morrison, 2010). This study gave Punjabi children the opportunity to interact with culturally-relevant stories in multimodal ways, and express their understandings through multiple literacies. The children constructed and shared meanings through verbal discussions, multimodal artwork and the inclusion of movement and dramatizations. They drew on a variety of lived experiences to make meaning from the stories. Their meaning-making processes were further enhanced by the collaborative experience of reading, constructing and sharing meanings. This study opens the door to future research into ways of using literature to foster engagement in the classroom and support children’s meaning-making processes.

abstract: While the literacy narrative genre has been studied in first-year composition and methods of teaching courses, investigations of the literacy narrative as a multimodal project for pre-service teachers (PSTs) of English Language Arts remain scarce. This research shares a qualitative classroom-based case study that focuses on a literacy narrative project, redesigned as a Multimodal Writing History Memoir (see Appendix 1), the first assignment in a required writing methods course in a teacher training program for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers at a large public university in the southwest. The study took place during the fall semester of 2019 with 15 ELA undergraduate pre-service English Education or Secondary Education majors. The study described here examined the implementation and outcomes of the multimodal writing history memoir with goals of better understanding how ELA PSTs design and compose multimodally, of understanding the topics and content they included in their memoirs, to discover how this project reflected PSTs’ ideas about teaching writing in their future classrooms. The memoir project invited pre-service teachers to infuse written, audio, and visual text while making use of at least four different mediums of their choice. Through combined theoretical frames, I explored semiotics, as well as pre-service teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they examined their conceptions of what it means to compose. In this qualitative analysis, I collected students’ memoirs and writing samples associated with the assignment, a demographics survey, and individual mid-semester interviews. The writing activities associated with the memoir included a series of quick writes (Kittle, 2009), responses to questions about writing and teachers’ responsibilities when it comes to teaching composition, and letters students wrote to one another during a peer review workshop. Additionally, my final data source included the handwritten notes I took during the presentations students gave to share their memoirs. Some discoveries I made center on the nuanced impact of acts of personal writing for PSTs, some of the specific teaching strategies and areas of teaching focus participants relayed, and specifically, how participants worked with and thought about teaching multimodal composition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2020

abstract: This interpretive dissertation study sought to understand what happened when a seventh-grade teacher introduced multimodal concepts and texts into his English Language Arts classroom. Multimodal texts contain linguistic features (words and sentences) but also images and graphic design features. The classroom teacher described himself as a novice with regards to multimodal literacies instruction and had previously focused predominantly on written or spoken texts. Motivating his decision to design and enact a multimodal literacies pedagogy was his belief that students needed to garner experience interpreting and composing the kinds of texts that populated his students’ social worlds. Therefore, I asked: What happened when multimodal narratives were used as mentor texts in a seventh-grade English Language Arts classroom? Drawing from ethnographic and case study methods, I observed and gathered data regarding how the teacher and his students enacted and experienced an eight-week curriculum unit centered on multimodal concepts and multimodal texts. My findings describe the classroom teacher’s design decisions, the messiness that occurred as the classroom was (re)made into a classroom community that valued modes beyond written and spoken language, and the students’ experiences of the curriculum as classroom work, lifework, play, and drudgery. Based on my findings, I developed six assertions: (1) when designing and enacting multimodal literacies curriculum for the first time, exposing students to a wide range of multimodal texts took precedence; (2) adapted and new multimodal literacy practices began to emerge, becoming valued practices over time; (3) literacy events occurred without being grounded in literacy practices; (4) in a classroom dedicated to writing, modes of representation and communication and their associated tools and materials provided students with resources for use in their own writing/making; (5) the roles of the teacher and his students underwent change as modal expertise became sourced from across the classroom community; and (6) students experienced the multimodal literacies curriculum as play, classroom work, lifework, and drudgery. The dissertation study concludes with implications for teachers and researchers looking to converge multimodality theory with pedagogical practices and maps future research possibilities. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Learning, Literacies and Technologies 2020